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Loading... Wizard of the Crowby Ngugi wa'Thiong'o
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  merry10 | Jun 18, 2009 |  This will probably go slowly, as the book is too heavy to make a good commute book. Will update as I go along.The dictator of the imaginary African country Abruria is under a curse. Volume 1 offers several possible explanations, while highlighting life under dictatorship and the wide gap between what the dictator says and what people actually experience. It's mostly in magical realist/satirical mode, which isn't my favorite narrative style. I was happy to finally meet the character who I think will become the eponymous wizard, an unemployed but very well-educated young man named Kamiti, who is almost buried as a corpse when he leaves his body in a trance as he experiences the country through the eyes of a crow. Returning to his body, he continues his job hunt. He is naive, personable, geeky, enthusiastic, and talkative; I thrilled to his eagerness to exposit about race relations in Abruria (Africa), the provinces of India, the colonial extent of education, the many languages of India, and just about everything. I am already rooting for his romance with the sympathetic and politically radical secretary Nyawira. coffeeandink | Jun 5, 2009 | Disturbing and humorous images of dictatorships and the people who struggle against them. The character the Wizard of the Crow is now on my top 10 list of favorite characters in novels. "Maybe knowledge was nothing more than the art of looking at what we already know with different eyes, and asking different questions. Knowledge is the discover of the magic of the ordinary. Like words into song." p.759 (  )1  lumber | Apr 5, 2009 | Perhaps his most important novel since PETALS OF BLOOD, WIZARD OF THE CROW is an extraordinary novel of twentieth-century Africa, that is by turns spiritual, funny, historical, fantastical, harrowing, and ultimately deeply human. Obvious comparisons are Salman Rushdie’s MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, but in case you are getting a little sick of seeing new books constantly compared to older more established tomes, the good news is that this book is truly an original. I can’t remember having read another book like it. ( )1 zenosbooks | Feb 24, 2009 | ‘Wizard of the Crow’ is a satire written with a fictitious African State dictatorship in mind which turns out to be based on Kenya of the early 1980’s. When I imagine this story I find I am visualizing theater, the dialogue plays all the facets of character relationships both political and social, personal and private, the scenes are usually discrete and the action moves back and forth in ‘acts’ from scene to scene. The plot unfolds, turns, twists, and develops often surprisingly and unpredictably but it never struck me as contrived. I wanted to continue with this story all the way through, and at 750 odd pages I did think this novel might be work but time flowed by effortlessly. ( )1 BeesleSR | Feb 2, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
Nyawira challenges Kamiti to have read African women's writing: Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria's Joys of Motherhood; Tsitsi Damgarembga of Zimbabwe's Nervous Conditions; Mariam Ba of Senegal's So Long a Letter. Indian women writers; Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, Meena Alexander's Fault Lines and Susie Tharu's Women Writing in India and We Were Making History. Later in the book The Palm Wine Drinkard is mentioned. (